Innovative Uses of Technology

The Police Department has implemented...

Police In-Car Computer System
Officers can enter all their incident and accident reports on the vehicle laptops, increasing effective and efficient reporting. Additionally, the officers can access other applications that allow information like photos and records to be obtained instantly in the field, thus enhancing their crime fighting ability. By reducing the time spent at headquarters filling out paper work, the officers can spend more time in the field.

Using grant funding, the in-car Panasonic CF-29 Toughbooks were recently
upgraded to the latest model, the CF-30. These new units have increased
memory and processing capabilities needed to perform all these tasks.
These in-car computers continue to grow in importance as new programs
become available for law enforcement applications.

Digital In-Car Video Cameras
New digital cameras (Panasonic Arbitrator Video system) were installed in the police vehicles. The digitally networked storage has increased the ease of retrieving video. Video is downloaded wirelessly to a server that allows it to be retrieved for review or used as evidence in a criminal proceeding. The system tracks and documents all actions, thus ensuring the video has not been tampered with and increasing its credibility in court.

The fact that no one has physically touched the video also lends itself
to increased credibility in court. A supervisor or the officer who
recorded the video can instantly review the video. This has proven to be
an invaluable training tool. The video can also be copied in several
different formats for later use (DVD, CD-ROM or Windows Media format).
This system is helping to refine the way Danville police officers go
about the business of police work.

Crash Reporting Program
The Danville Police Department entered into an agreement with the Virginia Division of Motor Vehicles to be a beta test site for the new crash reporting program. This new program allows officers to complete crash reports on the computers in their vehicles. This program includes an error checking functionality and a comprehensive diagramming feature. There are several advantages inherent to this new program. There is no longer a need to take up physical space with hard copies of crash reports.

The reports are more readily available to officers and redacted copies
can be emailed to insurance companies and members of the general public.

The LInX Project
The Danville Police Department was awarded a $419,070 grant to fund a regional data-sharing project to provide connectivity to the Law Enforcement Information Exchange known as “LInX”. The Danville Police and IT departments jointly developed this project to connect the records databases of twenty police agencies in Southside Virginia. The partner agencies have agreed to electronically share their data with each other and with other agencies across the state and nation, something that was impossible to do before.

What's unique about this project is that Danville will serve as a hub
and utilize a server purchased by the grant to store and manage the data
from the record management systems of the other partner agencies. The
funneling of all the data from the partner agencies into the hub in
Danville creates a regional network that reduces costs for everyone
involved. All of this data will then be linked to regional networks in
Virginia and other states and to various federal databases throughout
the country. The LInX network is managed by the Naval Criminal
Investigative Service (NCIS) in Hampton Roads. When the project went
operational in July of 2009, the Danville Police Department was able to
access all incident information, arrest reports, photographs,
investigative reports, citations, etc. from any of the linked agencies
by use of a secure encrypted website managed by the NCIS. In addition,
the software utilized by the system allows “links” to be drawn between
persons, vehicles, addresses, and telephone numbers, etc. that are
imbedded in the data, which produces a significant intelligence benefit.